Books I’ve read in april. Just two, because -and I’m trying to understand if I’ve caught some fancy tropical illness- I didn’t want to read… at all! Anyway, here they are!
° “Consigli a un giovane scrittore” by Vincenzo Cerami – it can be translated as “Advices to a young writer”, and it was! Biiiiig bookstore in Milan, a labyrinth with walls made of books, manuals, graphic novels, dvds and cds (yes, somewhat my idea of heaven). After spending a couple of hours trotting around helpless I decided to ask a salesperson where they kept creative writing manuals. He points to a little far away corner that I swear wasn’t there untill that moment. Anyway, I find two shelves, a bit hugry for books…, and since I’m such a “noob” I wasn’t recognizing any author (except for Virginia Woolf), therefore I was thinking “How can I trust a creative writing book if I do not know who the author is?”, but in the end, despite Virginia Woolf, I decided to stick with an italian author -after all italian is my mother language. Moreover this book was the only one who mentioned, in the index, things like screenplay, plot twists, comedy. I started reading it on the train back home. When I got home I googled Vincenzo Cerami and I get strucked by my ignorace, he’s done great things!!!
I liked the book, it’s essential (sometimes it’s so thick with infos I had to read again to absorbe it all) and I can’t way to put it to practice 
° “The Great Gatsby” by Francis Scott Fitzgerald – ah, books for 99 cents, how can I ever resist you? But… but it took me at least half the book to take interest in it. I don’t know if it’s a poor translation, but I got lost in the sentences, they were unnecessarily pompous, there where chiasms… really? Chiasms in prose? And I couldn’t stand the continuous flash back and forward, maybe at the time was a groundbreaking thing… I now find it breaking my reading flow, and that’s it, it’s confusing, it doesn’t show a thread, it feels like it doesn’t really have a plot… It feels like some snapshots and happenstances told by someone who’s struggling to remember…
Yes, I do get that that’s exactly how Nick’s telling it, and it feels real, ok, but I do not like it 😛
Moreover I did not see that “roaring twenties glamour” nor the “critique to the society” (if not in some dresses description and in a line at the end of the book), it was just a “eros/thanatos”… in the twenties… I’m also thinking that I wasn’t fancying reading much because I’ve found this little hundred of pages quite boring, I wasn’t compelled to go back reading… 